Module 12

https://www.beautifultrouble.org/training/for-trainers

snapshot: 

This module provides facilitators and organizers with accessible self-care and community care practices that support building effective, sustained movements for social change.

introduction:

Building resilience as individuals and communities enables us to create sustainable, impactful, and thriving groups to win social change for the long haul. This requires us to commit to transforming the ways in which we currently operate to prioritize a healthier self, healthier communities, and care-based relationships.

While occasional stress is a normal part of life, unmanaged, chronic stress can damage our health, our relationships, our networks, and our effectiveness as changemakers. Our experiences of trauma and oppression, including those acquired in direct confrontation with systems of violence, exploitation, and domination, can exacerbate this stress response. And we know too well the saying that “hurt people hurt people” — unless it’s addressed, the cycle of violence and abuse ripples out, person to person and generation to generation. Yet, abuse and interpersonal violence often go unaddressed in activist communities that are focused on an external threat or urgent goal. The damage that unmitigated exhaustion, stress, and abuse do to our movements is incalculable, and too often unacknowledged. By failing to take care of ourselves, we can harm our health, hinder our efforts, and hurt the people, causes, and communities we are trying to protect.

The tools in this module focus on three circles of care: self-care, collective care, and community resilience. We understand that healthy individuals and healthy communities are intimately intertwined. Thus, we can, and need to, address resilience at every level. Our aim is to offer an accessible set of resources tailored to activists, facilitators, and organizers. This is not a comprehensive guide. We encourage you to find a way that works for you to apply your learnings from this module and invest in yourself by practicing them. Do whatever works for you, but do it!

As facilitators, our goal is to help the group acquire and commit to applying practical self-care tools. In this context, self-care is not just about taking a bubble bath. It is about disrupting the normalized, oppressive state of radical individualism and transforming it into a state of collaboration and interdependence. These strategies were essential to the survival and functioning of ancient cultures; they are also keys to resolving the overlapping crises we face today. 

It’s also crucial to recognize that historically and to this day, the burden of care in families, communities, and activist groups has disproportionately fallen to women, particularly women of color. An intersectional, feminist lens is required to emphasize that “care” is a collective responsibility. We want to highlight that social change success necessitates intentionally building anti-oppressive care structures and tending to the processes that foster resilience.

Abusive relationships will not be addressed directly in this module, but there is no excuse for them, and they have no place in our social movements.  Furthermore, toxic expectations—such as perfectionism, which is rooted in white supremacy, or macho endurance, which is rooted in patriarchy—must be addressed in order to break cycles of harm and replace them with cycles of care. 

Since people-power is often seen as “putting your body on the line,” it is good praxis to acknowledge that the body keeps score and to learn how to ask for and receive the help we need to counterbalance this score. It can be irresponsible, or even life threatening, to do otherwise.

Disclaimer: This module is not a substitute for therapeutically addressing mental and emotional health concerns or engaging trained care providers.

Key concepts

• Self-care: The ability to self-regulate, co-regulate, and manage stress so that we each can contribute to and build sustainable support for our movement.
• Collective care: An expansion of the concept of self-care to focus on care for groups, networks, and mutually empowering relationships. 
• Community resilience: The ability of a group or community to sustain itself in the face of internal and external threats.
• Embodied practice: A restorative psychological process in which the body is used as a healing tool to align what we feel, think, and sense.
• Burnout: A state of emotional, physical, mental, and existential exhaustion resulting from prolonged, unmitigated stress. It manifests in different ways including energy depletion, isolation, and feelings of cynicism, bitterness, indifference, and/or paralysis.
• Praxis: A cycle of theory, action and reflection that helps us analyse our efforts so we can be more effective.
• Trauma-informed care: An approach to care that starts with “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”

Further information

• For an excellent grounding overview, see Making the Case for Self and Collective Care.
• To learn more about some of the ways in which you can support yourself and embody self-care, check out these tips on how to stay healthy, happy, and combative in impossible political times. You can also check out this emotional resilience webinar as an introduction to increasing collective emotional capacity.
• For a deeper dive into building community resilience through practical, real-world examples from civic spaces, check out the Resilient Conversations podcast.
• For an example on how to incorporate and promote self-care as an organization, check out FRIDA’s approach.
• To understand Why you should stop complimenting people for being 'resilient' in some situations,visit the link.
• Collective Care and Radical Healing from Calala Fondo de Mujeres has a wonderful list of resources as well as many powerful short stories.

training activities list

https://beautifultrouble.org/training/for-trainers

2023